, Columnist
China Needs to Talk About Sex
The state's vast family-planning apparatus can now be put to better use.
Unmarried couples don't get much advice about family planning.
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China’s decision to allow all families to have two children rather than one has rightly been celebrated as a welcome expansion of reproductive rights. But the shift raises another question: What should the government do with the hundreds of thousands of bureaucrats who work for China’s National Health and Family Planning Commission and its local offshoots, now that they’ll have fewer fines to collect and births to prevent?
If hard times befall these often brutal enforcers, no tears should be shed. But there might be a very good use for them: providing family planning services to China’s rapidly changing society.